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replaced by the ‘realist’ and former FSB director Evgeny Primakov as Russian Foreign
Minister in January 1996.
NATO moved ahead with its enlargement plans nonetheless. In September 1995, it
issued an Enlargement Study laying out criteria for accession. Applicant countries were
invited to start a dialogue on accession early the next year, and the Alliance confirmed
that it would announce its decision on the first round of accession countries at its July
1997 summit. As it turned out, the first round was limited to Poland, the Czech
Republic, and Hungary, which joined in early 1999. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,
Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined in March 2004, and Albania and Croatia did so
in April 2009, bringing the total to 28 member states today.
It is important to emphasise that enlargement was opposed, in many instances
passionately, by many influential American foreign policy experts, Democrats and
Republicans alike (Kupchan, 1994; Ikle, 1996; Rosner, 1996; Mandelbaum, 1996;
Kline, 1997; Lieven, 1997; Kennan, 1998; Gaddis, 1998; Waltz, 1998). Most notably,
more than 40 influential foreign policy experts, including former US Senators from both
sides of the aisle, former ambassadors, former cabinet officials, and academics who
were not known as particularly pro-Russian or dovish, wrote an open letter to President
Clinton dated 26 June 1997, which began as follows:
We, the undersigned, believe that the current US-led effort to expand
NATO, the focus of the recent Helsinki and Paris Summits, is a policy
error of historic proportions. We believe that NATO expansion will
decrease allied security and unsettle European stability’ (Burton et
al., 1997). It went on to list a host of reasons, all of which were by
then familiar to anyone following the controversy, why NATO
expansion was a mistake of ‘historic proportions.’
Moscow’s continuing objections to enlargement, along with widespread domestic
criticism of the policy establishment, led the Clinton administration to make another
effort to arrive at an institutional arrangement that would square the enlargement circle.
On 27 May 1997, NATO and Russia signed the Founding Act of the Russia-NATO
Permanent Joint Council. Among other provisions, the Act called on the signatories to
support the conflict prevention efforts of the CSCE and respect the UN Security
Council’s sole right to authorise the use of force against a sovereign member state. In a
key passage on NATO force dispositions, it also stated that NATO agreed that,
Ukraine and Russia: People, Politics, Propaganda and Perspectives